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arXiv:1604.07056 · Physical Review Letters

Accessing Many-Body Localized States through the Generalized Gibbs Ensemble

Stephen Inglis, Lode Pollet

Published Sep 13, 2016• 55 citations
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Abstract

We show how the thermodynamic properties of large many-body localized systems can be studied using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We devise a heuristic way of constructing local integrals of motion of high quality, which are added to the Hamiltonian in conjunction with Lagrange multipliers. The ground state simulation of the shifted Hamiltonian corresponds to a high-energy state of the original Hamiltonian in the case of exactly known local integrals of motion. The inevitable mixing between eigenstates as a consequence of nonperfect integrals of motion is weak enough such that the characteristics of many-body localized systems are not averaged out, unlike the standard ensembles of statistical mechanics. Our method paves the way to study higher dimensions and indicates that a fully many-body localized phase in 2D, where (nearly) all eigenstates are localized, is likely to exist.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.117.120402

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We show how the thermodynamic properties of large many-body localized systems can be studied using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We devise a heuristic way of constructing local integrals of motion of high quality, which are added to the Hamiltonian in conjunction with Lagrange multipliers. The ground state simulation of the shifted Hamiltonian corresponds to a high-energy state of the original Hamiltonian in the case of exactly known local integrals of motion. The inevitable mixing between eigenstates as a consequence of nonperfect integrals of motion is weak enough such that the characteristics of many-body localized systems are not averaged out, unlike the standard ensembles of statistical mechanics. Our method paves the way to study higher dimensions and indicates that a fully many-body localized phase in 2D, where (nearly) all eigenstates are localized, is likely to exist.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis conjectures that for a thermodynamically large system in one of its energy eigenstates, the reduced density matrix describing any finite subsystem is determined solely by a set of relevant conserved quantities. In a chaotic quantum system, only the energy is expected to play that role and hence eigenstates appear locally thermal. Integrable systems, on the other hand, possess an extensive number of such conserved quantities and therefore the reduced density matrix requires specification of all the corresponding parameters (generalized Gibbs ensemble). However, here we show by unbiased statistical sampling of the individual eigenstates with a given finite energy density that the local description of an overwhelming majority of these states of even such an integrable system is actually Gibbs-like, i.e., requires only the energy density of the eigenstate. Rare eigenstates that cannot be represented by the Gibbs ensemble can also be sampled efficiently by our method and their local properties are then shown to be described by appropriately truncated generalized Gibbs ensembles. We further show that the presence of these rare eigenstates differentiates the model from the chaotic case and leads to the system being described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble at long time under a unitary dynamics following a sudden quench, even when the initial state is a typical (Gibbs-like) eigenstate of the prequench Hamiltonian.
Many-body localization provides a generic mechanism of ergodicity breaking in quantum systems. In contrast to conventional ergodic systems, many-body-localized (MBL) systems are characterized by extensively many local integrals of motion (LIOM), which underlie the absence of transport and thermalization in these systems. Here we report a physically motivated construction of local integrals of motion in the MBL phase. We show that any local operator (e.g., a local particle number or a spin-flip operator), evolved with the system's Hamiltonian and averaged over time, becomes a LIOM in the MBL phase. Such operators have a clear physical meaning, describing the response of the MBL system to a local perturbation. In particular, when a local operator represents a density of some globally conserved quantity, the corresponding LIOM describes how this conserved quantity propagates through the MBL phase. Being uniquely defined and experimentally measurable, these LIOMs provide a natural tool for characterizing the properties of the MBL phase, in both experiments and numerical simulations. We demonstrate the latter by numerically constructing an extensive set of LIOMs in the MBL phase of a disordered spin-chain model. We show that the resulting LIOMs are quasilocal and use their decay to extract the localization length and establish the location of the transition between the MBL and ergodic phases.
Disorder and interactions can lead to the breakdown of statistical mechanics in quantum systems by transitioning to a many-body localized (MBL) phase. The thermal-to-MBL transition occurs by either increasing the amount of disorder present in a system or by decreasing its energy until it crosses the so-called mobility edge. The authors construct a set of approximate integrals of motion that are quasi-universal across the energy spectrum and, thus, across the mobility edge, too. Interestingly, MBL eigenstates under the mobility edge are aware of the existence of a thermal phase at a higher energy. The phase diagram is probed close to the transition and in the MBL phase. One finds a universal distribution of the strength of the couplings of the integrals of motion in the strong disorder limit.
Many-body localization (MBL) addresses the absence of thermalization in interacting quantum systems, with nonergodic high-energy eigenstates behaving as ground states, only area-law entangled. However, computing highly excited many-body eigenstates using exact methods is very challenging. Instead, we show that one can address high-energy MBL physics using ground-state methods, which are much more amenable to many efficient algorithms. We find that a localized many-body ground state of a given interacting disordered Hamiltonian H0{\mathcal{H}}_{0}H0​ is a very good approximation for a high-energy eigenstate of a parent Hamiltonian, close to H0{\mathcal{H}}_{0}H0​ but more disordered. This construction relies on computing the covariance matrix, easily achieved using density-matrix renormalization group for disordered Heisenberg chains up to L=256L=256L=256 sites.
We construct a complete set of local integrals of motion that characterize the many-body localized (MBL) phase. Our approach relies on the assumption that local perturbations act locally on the eigenstates in the MBL phase, which is supported by numerical simulations of the random-field XXZ spin chain. We describe the structure of the eigenstates in the MBL phase and discuss the implications of local conservation laws for its nonequilibrium quantum dynamics. We argue that the many-body localization can be used to protect coherence in the system by suppressing relaxation between eigenstates with different local integrals of motion.
Systems where all energy eigenstates are localized are known to display an emergent local integrability, in the sense that one can construct an extensive number of operators that commute with the Hamiltonian and are localized in real space. Here we show that emergent local integrability does not require a set of localized eigenstates to be complete. Given a set of localized eigenstates comprising a nonzero fraction $(1\ensuremath{-}{p}_{f})$ of the full many-body spectrum, one can construct an extensive number of integrals of motion which are local in the sense that they have nonzero weight in a compact region of real space, in the thermodynamic limit. However, these modified integrals of motion have a ``global dressing'' whose weight vanishes as $\ensuremath{\sim}{p}_{f}$ as ${p}_{f}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$. In this sense, the existence of a nonzero fraction of localized eigenstates is sufficient for emergent local integrability. We discuss the implications of our findings for systems where the spectrum contains delocalized states, for systems with projected Hilbert spaces, and for the robustness of quantum integrability.